SOURCE: "Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880-1914," in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperalism, 1830-1914, Cornell, 1988, pp. 227-53.

[In the book-length study excerpted below, Brantlinger examines the genre he identifies as "imperial gothic," which uses spiritualism to emphasize the themes of regression, invasion, and the lack of British heroism. In this excerpt, the critic argues that the genre is symptomatic of the gradual disintegration of British imperialism towards the end of the nineteenth century.]

In "The Little Brass God," a 1905 story by Bithia Croker, a statue of "Kali, Goddess of Destruction," brings misfortune to its unwitting Anglo-Indian possessors. First their pets kill each other or are killed in accidents; next the servants get sick or fall downstairs; then the family's lives are jeopardized. Finally the statue is stolen and dropped down a well, thus ending the curse.¹ This featherweight tale typifies many written between 1880 and 1914. Its central feature, the magic statue, suggests that Western rationality may be subverted by the very superstitions it rejects. The destructive magic of the Orient takes its revenge; Croker unwittingly expresses a social version of the return of the repressed characteristic of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction, including that blend of adventure story with Gothic elements—imperial Gothic, as I will call it—which flourished from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines in 1885 down at least to John Buchan's Greenmantle in 1916. Imperial Gothic combines the seemingly scientific, progressive, often Darwinian ideology of imperialism with an antithetical interest in the occult. Although the connections between imperialism and other aspects of late Victorian and Edwardian culture are innumerable, the link with occultism is especially symptomatic of the anxieties that attended the climax of the British Empire. No form of cultural expression reveals more clearly the contradictions within that climax than imperial Gothic.

Impelled by scientific materialism, the search for new sources of faith led many late Victorians to telepathy, séances, and psychic research. It also led to the far reaches of the Empire, where strange gods and "unspeakable rites" still had their millions of devotees. Publication of Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled in 1877 marks the beginning of this trend, and the stunning success of Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia (1879) suggests the strength of the desire for alternatives to both religious orthodoxy and scientific skepticism.² For the same reason, A. P. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism (1883) was widely popular, as was his earlier The Occult World (1881).³ The standard explanation for the flourishing of occultism in the second half of the nineteenth century is that "triumphant positivism sparked an international reaction against its restrictive world view." In illustrating this thesis, Janet Oppenheim lists some manifestations of that reaction: "In England, it was an age of . . . the Rosicrucian revival, of cabalists, Hermeticists, and reincarnationists. In the late 1880s, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn first saw the light of day in London, and during its stormy history, the Order lured into its arcane activities not only W. B. Yeats, but also the self-proclaimed magus Aleister Crowley. . . . Palmists and astrologers abounded, while books on magic and the occult sold briskly."⁴ Oppenheim's thesis that "much of the attraction of these and related subjects depended on the dominant role that science had assumed in modern culture" (160) is borne out by the testimony of those drawn to occultism, among them Arthur Conan Doyle, Annie Besant, Arthur J. Balfour, and Oliver Lodge. At the same time an emphasis on the occult aspects of experience was often reconciled with "science" and even with Darwinism; such a reconciliation characterizes Andrew Lang's interests in both anthropology and psychic research, as well as the various neo-Hegelian justifications of Empire. Thus in Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (1900), J. A. Cramb argues that "empires are successive incarnations of the Divine ideas," but also that empires result from the struggle for survival of the fittest among nations and races. The British nation and Anglo-Saxon race, he contends, are the fittest to survive.⁵

Imperialism itself, as an ideology or political faith, functioned as a partial substitute for declining or fallen Christianity and for declining faith in Britain's future. The poet John Davidson, for instance, having rejected other creeds and causes, "committed himself to a cluster of ideas centering on hero worship, and heroic vitalism," according to his biographer, which led him to pen ardent celebrations of the Empire.⁶ In "St. George's Day," Davidson writes:

The Sphinx that watches by the Nile
Has seen great empires pass away:
The mightiest lasted but a while;
Yet ours shall not decay—

a claim that by the 1890s obviously required extraordinary faith.⁷ The religious quality of late Victorian imperialism is also evident in much of Rudyard Kipling's poetry, as in "Recessional":

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

⁸

In his study of William Ernest Henley, who did much to encourage the expression of imperialism in fin-desiècle literature, Jerome Buckley remarks that "by the last decade of the century, the concept of a national or racial absolute inspired a fervor comparable to that engendered by the older evangelical religion."⁹

Imperialism and occultism both functioned as ersatz religions, but their fusion in imperial Gothic represents something different from a search for new faiths. The patterns of atavism and going native described by imperialist romancers do not offer Salvationist answers for seekers after religious truth; they offer instead insistent images of decline and fall or of civilization turning into its opposite just as the Englishman who desecrates a Hindu temple in Kipling's "Mark of the Beast" turns into a werewolf. Imperial Gothic expresses anxieties about the waning of religious orthodoxy, but even more clearly it expresses anxieties about the ease with which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery and thus about the weakening of Britain's imperial hegemony. The atavistic descents into the primitive experienced by fictional characters seem often to be allegories of the larger regressive movement of civilizzation, British progress transformed into British back-sliding. So the first section of Richard Jefferies's apocalyptic fantasy After London (1885) is entitled "The Relapse into Barbarism." Similarly, the narrator of Erskine Childers's spy novel Riddle of the Sands (1903) starts his tale in this way: "I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude—save for a few black faces—have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to . . . prevent a relapse into barbarism."¹⁰ Much imperialist writing after about 1880 treats the Empire as a barricade against a new barbarian invasion; just as often it treats the Empire as a "dressing for dinner," a temporary means of preventing Britain itself from relapsing into barbarism.

After the mid-Victorian years the British found it increasingly difficult to think of themselves as inevitably progressive; they began worrying instead about the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial "stock." In Mark Rutherford's Deliverance (1885), William Hale White writes that "our civilization is nothing but a thin film or crust lying over a volcanic pit," and in Fabian Essays (1889), George Bernard Shaw contends that Britain is "in an advanced state of rottenness."¹¹ Much of the literary culture of the period expresses similar views. The aesthetic and decadent movements offer sinister analogies to Roman imperial decline and fall, while realistic novelists—George Gissing and Thomas Hardy, for instance—paint gloomy pictures of contemporary society and "the ache of modernism" (some of Gissing's pictures are explicitly anti-imperialist). Apocalyptic themes and images are characteristic of imperial Gothic, in which, despite the consciously pro-Empire values of many authors, the feeling emerges that "we are those upon whom the ends of the world are come."¹²

The three principal themes of imperial Gothic are individual regression or going native; an invasion of civilization by the forces of barbarism or demonism; and the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world. In the romances of Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, Doyle, Bram Stoker, and John Buchan the supernatural or paranormal, usually symptomatic of individual regression, often manifests itself in imperial settings. Noting that Anglo-Indian fiction frequently deals with "inexplicable curses, demonic possession, and ghostly visitations," Lewis Wurgaft cites Kipling's "Phantom Rickshaw" as typical, and countless such tales were set in Burma, Egypt, Nigeria, and other parts of the Empire as well.¹³ In Edgar Wallace's Sanders of the River (1909), for example, the commissioner of a West African territory out-savages the savages, partly through police brutality but partly also through his knowledge of witchcraft. Says the narrator: "You can no more explain many happenings which are the merest commonplace in [Africa] than you can explain the miracle of faith or the wonder of telepathy."¹⁴

In numerous late Victorian and Edwardian stories, moreover, occult phenomena follow characters from imperial settings home to Britain. In Doyle's "The Brown Hand" (1899), an Anglo-Indian doctor is haunted after his return to England by the ghost of an Afghan whose hand he had amputated. In "The Ring of Thoth" (1890) and "Lot No. 249" ( 1892), Egyptian mummies come to life in the Louvre and in the rooms of an Oxford student.¹⁵ In all three stories, western science discovers or triggers supernatural effects associated with the "mysterious Orient." My favorite story of this type is H. G. Wells's "The Truth about Pyecraft," in which an obese Londoner takes an Indian recipe for "loss of weight" but instead of slimming down, begins levitating. The problem caused by oriental magic is then solved by western technology: lead underwear, which allows the balloonlike Mr. Pyecraft to live almost normally, feet on the ground.

The causes of the upsurge in romance writing toward the end of the century are numerous, complex, and often the same as those of the upsurge of occultism. Thus the new romanticism in fiction is frequently explained by its advocates—Stevenson, Haggard, Lang, and others—as a reaction against scientific materialism as embodied in "realistic" or "naturalistic" narratives. The most enthusiastic defender of the new fashion for romances was Andrew Lang, who thought the realism of George Eliot and Henry James intellectually superior but also that the romances of Stevenson and Haggard tapped universal, deep-rooted, "primitive" aspects of human nature which the realists could not approach. "Fiction is a shield with two sides, the silver and the golden: the study of manners and of character, on one hand; on the other, the description of adventure, the delight of romantic narrative."¹⁶ Although he sees a place for both kinds of fiction, Lang has little patience with, for example, Dostoevsky's gloomy honesty: "I, for one, admire M. Dostoieffsky so much . . . that I pay him the supreme tribute of never reading him at all" (685). Lang prefers literature of a middle-brow sort, on a level with his own critical journalism, or, farther down the scale of cultural value, he prefers adventure stories written for boys: "'Treasure Island' and 'Kidnapped' are boys' books written by an author of whose genius, for narrative, for delineation of character, for style, I hardly care to speak, lest enthusiasm should seem to border on fanaticism" (690). Lang feels that Haggard is by no means so sophisticated a writer as Stevenson, but this is almost an advantage: the less sophisticated or the more boyish, the better.

All the same, Lang believes, realism in fiction should coexist with romanticism just as the rational, conscious side of human nature coexists with the unconscious. Lang can appreciate realistic novels intellectually, but "the natural man within me, the survival of some blue-painted Briton or of some gipsy," is "equally pleased with a true Zulu love story" (689). He therefore declares that "the advantage of our mixed condition, civilized at top with the old barbarian under our clothes, is just this, that we can enjoy all sorts of things" (690). Romances may be unsophisticated affairs, but because they appeal to the barbarian buried self of the reader, they are more fundamental, more honest, more natural than realism. In Lang's criticism, romances are "'savage survivals,' but so is the whole of the poetic way of regarding Nature" (690).

An anthropologist of sorts, Lang acquired his theory of savage survivals from his mentor Edward Burnett Tylor, who contends that occultism and spiritualism—indeed, all forms of superstition (and therefore, implicitly, of religion)—belong to "the philosophy of savages." Modern occultism, according to Tylor, is "a direct revival from the regions of savage philosophy and peasant folk-lore," a reversion to "primitive culture."¹⁷ At the same time Tylor associates poetry with the mythology of primitive peoples: "The mental condition of the lower races is the key to poetry, nor is it a small portion of the poetic realm which these definitions cover" (2:533). Literary activity in general thus appears to be a throwback to prerational states of mind and society. Similarly, Arthur Machen, author of numerous Gothic horror stories from the 1890s onward, defines literature as "the endeavour of every age to return to the first age, to an age, if you like, of savages."¹⁸

Robert Louis Stevenson, who echoes Lang's defenses of romances as against novels, discovered sources of "primitive" poetic energy in his own psyche, most notably through the nightmare that yielded Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson entertained ambivalent feelings toward the popularity of that "Gothic gnome" or "crawler," in part because any popular appeal seemed irrational or vaguely barbaric to him. Although not overtly about imperial matters, Jekyll and Hyde, perhaps even more than Treasure Island and Kidnapped, served as a model for later writers of imperial Gothic fantasies. Because "within the Gothic we can find a very intense, if displaced, engagement with political and social problems," it is possible, as David Punter argues, to read Jekyll and Hyde as itself an example of imperial Gothic: "It is strongly suggested [by Stevenson] that Hyde's behaviour is an urban version of 'going native.' The particular difficulties encountered by English imperialism in its decline were conditioned by the nature of the supremacy which had been asserted: not a simple racial supremacy, but one constantly seen as founded on moral superiority. If an empire based on a morality declines, what are the implications . . . ? It is precisely Jekyll's 'high views' which produce morbidity in his alter ego."¹⁹ Jekyll's alchemy releases the apelike barbarian—the savage or natural man—who lives beneath the civilized skin. Not only is this the general fantasy of going native in imperial Gothic, but Hyde—murderous, primitive, apelike—fits the Victorian stereotype of the Irish hooligan, and his dastardly murder of Sir Danvers Carew resembles some of the "Fenian outrages" of the early 1880s.²⁰

Imperial Gothic is related to several other forms of romance writing which flourished between 1880 and 1914. Judith Wilt has argued for the existence of subterranean links between late Victorian imperialism, the resurrection of Gothic romance formulas, and the conversion of Gothic into science fiction. "In or around December, 1897," she writes, "Victorian gothic changed—into Victorian science fiction. The occasion was . . . Wells's War of the Worlds, which followed by only a few months Bram Stoker's . . . Dracula."²¹ A similar connection is evident between imperial Gothic and the romance fictions of the decadent movement, as in Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, which traces an atavistic descent into criminal self-indulgence as mirrored by a changing portrait. Both Stoker's and Wells's romances can be read, moreover, as fanciful versions of yet another popular literary form, invasion-scare stories, in which the outward movement of imperialist adventure is reversed, a pattern foreshadowed by the returned convict theme in Botany Bay eclogues. Dracula itself is an individual invasion or demonic possession fantasy with political implications. Not only is Stoker's bloodthirsty Count the "final aristocrat," he is also the last of a "conquering race," as Dracula explains to Jonathan Harker:

We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa, too, till the peoples thought that the were-wolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia, had mated with the devils in the desert. Fool, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins? . . . Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race?²²

The whirlpool of the Count's own ideas, confounding racism with the mixing of races, pride in pure blood with blood-sucking cannibalism, and aristocratic descent with witchcraft and barbarism, reads like a grim parody of the "conquering race" rhetoric in much imperialist writing, a premonition of fascism. In common with several other Gothic invaders in late Victorian fiction, moreover, Dracula threatens to create a demonic empire of the dead from the living British Empire. "This was the being I was helping to transfer to London," says Jonathan Harker, "where, perhaps for centuries to come, he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless" (67).

A similar demonic invasion is threatened in Haggard's She: Ayesha plans to usurp the British throne from Queen Victoria, though fortunately her second dousing in the flames of immortality kills her before she can leave the Caves of Kôr for London.²³ Horace Holly, the principal narrator of Haggard's romance, explains the situation: "Evidently the terrible She had determined to go to England, and it made me shudder to think what would be the result of her arrival. . . . In the end, I had little doubt, she would assume absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most glorious and prosperous empire that the world has ever seen, it must be at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life."²⁴ Though Haggard resurrects Ayesha in later romances, his archetype of feminine domination grows tamer and never travels to Britain. Several critics have seen in both She and Dracula the threat of the New Woman to Victorian patriarchy, and Queen Tera, the mummy who comes to life in Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903), represents the same threat. Norman Etherington calls Ayesha "a Diana in jack-boots who preaches materialism in philosophy and fascism in politics" (47), while Nina Auerbach notes that Ayesha's dream of eternal love and immortality is fused with the nightmare of universal empire. In Ayesha's case, "love does not tranquilize womanhood into domestic confinement, but fuels her latent powers into political life."²⁵ Although the New Woman is one of the threats underlying the demonism of Ayesha and also of Dracula and his female victims, however, Haggard's and Stoker's apocalyptic fears are comprehensive: the demons who threaten to subvert the Empire and invade Britain are of both sexes and come in many guises.

Often Wells's translations of Gothic conventions into quasi-scientific ones also suggest demonic subversions of the Empire or—what amounts to the same thing in late Victorian and Edwardian writing—of civilization. "It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted," Wells writes of his "scientific romances." "I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible."²⁶The War of the Worlds is the classic science fiction, invasion-from-outer-space fantasy, though Wells wrote many related stories—"The Empire of the Ants," for example, in which superintelligent, poisonous ants from the Amazon Basin threaten to overwhelm first British Guiana and then the entire world, founding their insect empire upon the ruins of human ones.

Numerous invasion fantasies were written between 1880 and 1914 without Gothic overtones. The ur-text is Sir George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking, which first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in 1871. In the bibliography to Voices Prophesying War, I. F. Clarke lists dozens of "imaginary war" novels published between 1871 and 1914, many of them following an invasion-of-Britain pattern. Among them are T. A. Guthrie's The Seizure of the Channel Tunnel (1882), H. F. Lester's The Taking of Dover (1888), and the anonymous The Sack of London in the Great French War of 1901 (1901). Several novels also appeared, both in Britain and elsewhere, with titles along the lines of Decline and Fall of the British Empire, as well as invasion-of-India stories.²⁷ Clearly this was not the fiction of a generation of writers confident about the future of Britain or its Empire. The essence of the genre is captured in P. G. Wodehouse's 1909 parody The Swoop . . . A Tale of the Great Invasion, in which Britain is overwhelmed by simultaneous onslaughts of Germans, Russians, Chinese, Young Turks, the Swiss Navy, Moroccan brigands, cannibals in war canoes, the Prince of Monaco, and the Mad Mullah, until it is saved by a patriotic Boy Scout named Clarence Chugwater. The only question left to the reader's imagination is why these various forces of barbarism should want to invade so decrepit a country.²⁸

Invasion-scare stories often intersect with spy stories. David Stafford gives 1893 as the date of "the birth of the British spy novel," with publication of William Le Queux's The Great War in England in 1897, and the subgenre includes many stories, among them Childers's Riddle of the Sands, that contain elements of imperial Gothic.²⁹ Spy stories can be as upbeat as Kipling's Kim, full of an evident delight in playing the Great Game in Asia, with little to fear from the bungling French and Russian agents whom Kim helps to foil, or as fear-ridden as Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps, characterized by a breathless paranoia as the hero flees his would-be assassins through a British countryside where no one is to be trusted. Even Kim, however, fits Stafford's general description of spy fiction: "The world presented by these novels is a . . . treacherous one in which Britain is the target of the envy, hostility, and malevolence of the other European powers" (497-98).

All of these popular romance formulas—imperial Gothic, Wellsian science fiction, invasion fantasies, spy stories—betray anxieties characteristic of late Victorian and Edwardian imperialism both as an ideology and as a phase of political development. To Wilt's and Stafford's mainly literary perspectives can be added a socioeconomic one, related to those theories of J. A. Hobson and Joseph Schumpeter which treat imperialism itself as an atavistic stage of economic and political development. Although Schumpeter argues against the economic imperialism espoused by Hobson and later, in modified forms, by Lenin and other Marxists, his contention that "imperialism is . . . atavistic in character" fits both imperial Gothic and the flourishing of occultism.³⁰ Schumpeter identifies capitalism with progress through rational self-interest and therefore fails to see it as a source of social irrationality and regression. Hobson, on the other hand, sees imperialism as a direct result of underconsumption at home and capitalism's consequent search for ever-expanding markets abroad. But in terms of ideological and cultural effects, both Schumpeter and Hobson view imperialism as a retrograde social development, a backsliding toward barbarism.

Hobson locates the causes of "national hate" and international aggression as much in cultural as in economic factors, though for him culture and economics are finally inseparable.³¹ Hobson was as much influenced by John Ruskin as by Richard Cobden (the best book on Ruskin published during the nineteenth century is Hobson's); his condemnation of industrialism is less sweeping than Ruskin's, but his "economic humanism" nevertheless echoes Unto This Last and Fors Clavigera.³² Ruskin, however, like his own mentor Carlyle, celebrated war as a supreme social value and offered little criticism of British overseas aggression, whereas Hobson contends that uncontrolled industrial capitalism generates wars and leads to the imperialization of preindustrial peoples. Ruskin saw that so-called industrial progress adversely affected nature, town life, workers, owners, the arts; Hobson sees that it also entails an expansive militarization that rides roughshod over older patterns of democracy and liberal nationalism toward an era of ruinous wars.

Both Ruskin and Hobson interpret in terms of regression much that their contemporaries understand as progress. According to Hobson, "the rapid and numerous changes in the external structure of modern civilization have been accompanied by grave unsettlement of the inner life; a breaking up of time-honoured dogmas, a collapse of principles in politics, religion, and morality have sensibly reduced the power of resistance to strong passionate suggestions in the individuals of all classes. Hence the common paradox that an age of universal scepticism may also be an age of multifarious superstitions, lightly acquired and briefly held, but dangerous for character and conduct while they hold their sway."³³ By superstitions Hobson appears to mean a variety of ideological phenomena, including both imperialism and occultism. In any event, he is especially distressed that universal education and the new mass literacy have failed to increase democratic rationality but instead seem to have undermined the intelligence of public opinion. "The popularization of the power to read has made the press the chief instrument of brutality. . . . A biassed, enslaved, and poisoned press has been the chief engine for manufacturing Jingoism" (29, 125). The very machinery that makes mass literacy possible Hobson sees as having deleterious side-effects. The "terse, dogmatic, unqualified, and unverifiable cablegram," for example, seems to represent technological progress but is instead, Hobson believes, a source of "emotional explosive" and mob sentiment (11). On the one hand, industrialization has created "mechanical facilities for cheap, quick carriage of persons, goods, and news"; on the other, a newly literate but poorly educated urban population is easy prey for sensational journalists and warmongering financiers. These new shapers of public opinion diffuse a potent ideological mix consisting of adulterated versions of social Darwinism, the chauvinistic ethos of the public schools and universities, the "khaki Christianity" of the churches, and above all the racism and narrow-mindedness of the music halls: "The glorification of brute force and an ignorant contempt for foreigners are ever-present factors which . . . make the music-hall a very serviceable engine for generating military passion" (2).

For Hobson, therefore, the path of social regression is marked by the signs of a corrupting, degenerate mass culture. He believes that "the physical and mental conditions of . . . town-life" breed "the very atmosphere of Jingoism. A coarse patriotism, fed by the wildest rumours and the most violent appeals to hate and the animal lust of blood, passes by quick contagion through the crowded life of cities, and recommends itself everywhere by the satisfaction it affords to sensational cravings" (8-9). Hobson is thinking partly of the riotous celebrations in London and other British cities which followed the lifting of the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking during the Boer War. Something was at work in those mob scenes far more destructive than the breaking of the Hyde Park railings which had distressed Matthew Arnold in 1866, even though the later rioters were presumably patriots celebrating British victories. Jingoism fused with the social imperialism of Joseph Chamberlain in the 1890s to emerge as the chief rival to liberalism and socialism for the allegiance of the new working- and lower middle-class voters, foreshadowing fascism. In The Psychology of Jingoism, Hobson interprets the ideological success of imperialism as threatening the entire project of civilizing humanity, including British humanity at home. During mob expressions of jingoism, Hobson declares, "the superstructure which centuries of civilization have imposed upon . . . the individual, gives way before some sudden wave of ancient savage nature roused from its subconscious depths" (19). If such a regression is possible for the individual who joins the mob, then it is also possible for an entire society—even the seemingly most civilized, most progressive society—and for Hobson one name for such a reversion to barbarism is imperialism, "a depraved choice of national life" transforming democratic civilization into a savage anarchy clamoring for war. "For the purposes of the present study . . . the hypothesis of reversion to a savage type of nature is distinctly profitable. The [modern] war-spirit. . . is composed of just those qualities which differentiate savage from civilized man" (19).

Numerous travel writers from about 1870 onward lament the decline of exploration into mere tourism. In "Regrets of a Veteran Traveller" (1897), Frederic Harrison declares: "Railways, telegraphs, and circular tours in twenty days have opened to the million the wonders of foreign parts." These signs of technological progress, however, conceal losses: "Have they not sown broadcast disfigurement, vulgarity, stupidity, demoralisation? Europe is changed indeed since the unprogressive forties! Is it all for the better?"³⁴ The old ideal of opening up the dark places of the world to civilization, commerce, and Christianity fades into the tourist trade: "Morally, we Britons plant the British flag on every peak and pass; and wherever the Union Jack floats there we place the cardinal British institutions—tea, tubs, sanitary appliances, lawn tennis, and churches; all of them excellent things in season. But the missionary zeal of our people is not always according to knowledge and discretion" (241). Before the ugly American came the ugly Briton, clutching a Baedeker or a Cook's travel guide. Harrison thinks it has all become too easy, too common, too standardized to be heroic or adventuresome—"We go abroad, but we travel no longer."

Imperial Gothic frequently expresses anxiety about the waning of opportunities for heroic adventure. With regression and invasion, this is the third of its major themes (ironic today, given Hollywood's frequent regressions to Haggard and Kipling for its adventure tales, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Early Victorian adventure writers—Marryat, Charnier, Mayne Reid, R. M. Ballantyne—took as self-evident the notion that England was the vanguard nation, leading the world toward the future. As one of the marooned boys in Ballantyne's Coral Island (1856) says, "We'll take possession of [this island] in the name of the King; we'll . . . enter the service of its black inhabitants. Of course we'll rise, naturally, to the top of affairs. White men always do in savage countries."³⁵ Upbeat racism and chauvinism continued to characterize boys' adventure fiction well into the twentieth century, but in imperial Gothic white men do not always rise to the top—just as often they sink into savagedom, cowardice, or exotic torpor, as in Tennyson's "Lotos Eaters." Conrad's fictions frequently read like botched romances in which adventure turns sour or squalid, undermined by moral frailty, and the same is true also of Stevenson's most realistic stories—The Beach of Falesá, The Wreckers, Ebb-Tide. Lord Jim's failure to live up to his heroic self-image has analogues in many imperial Gothic stories that are not ostensibly critical of imperialism.

The fear that adventure may be a thing of the past in the real world led many writers to seek it in the unreal world of romance, dreams, imagination. "Soon the ancient mystery of Africa will have vanished," Haggard laments in an 1894 essay appropriately titled "'Elephant Smashing' and 'Lion Shooting.'" Where, he dolefully asks, "will the romance writers of future generations find a safe and secret place, unknown to the pestilent accuracy of the geographer, in which to lay their plots?"³⁶ In similar fashion, in both Heart of Darkness and his autobiographical essays, Conrad registers his youthful excitement over the blank places on the map of Africa and the disillusionment he felt when he arrived at Stanley Falls in 1890: "A great melancholy descended on me . . . there was . . . no great haunting memory . . . only the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper 'stunt' and the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. What an end to the idealized realities of a boy's daydreams! I wondered what I was doing there."³⁷ The stunt was Stanley's 1871 trek into Central Africa in search of Livingstone for the New York Herald, the scramble for loot that Conrad saw at first hand King Leopold's rapacious private empire in the Congo.

Arguments defending theosophy and spiritualism often sound like Haggard's and Conrad's laments for the waning of geographical adventure: the disappearance of earthly frontiers will be compensated for by the opening of new frontiers in the beyond. Not only were occultists seeking proofs of immortality and of a spiritual realm above or beneath the material one, they were also seeking adventure. The fantasy element in such adventure seeking is its most obvious feature, as it is also in the literary turn away from realism to romanticism. According to Lang: "As the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem to hope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far from us. . . . The ordinary shilling tales of 'hypnotism' and mesmerism are vulgar trash enough, and yet I can believe that an impossible romance, if the right man wrote it in the right mood, might still win us from the newspapers, and the stories of shabby love, and cheap remorses, and commonplace failures."³⁸ But even a well-written impossible romance, as Lang well knows, carries with it more than a hint of childish daydreaming.

If imperialist ideology is atavistic, occultism is obviously so, a rejection of individual and social rationality and a movement backward to primitive or infantile modes of perception and belief. "Ages, empires, civilisations pass, and leave some members even of educated mankind still, in certain points, on the level of the savage who propitiates with gifts, or addresses with prayers, the spirits of the dead"—so Lang writes in Cock Lane and Common Sense (1894), intended in part to expose the spurious aspects of spiritualism.³⁹ Lang believes that much of what goes by that name is fraudulent: "As to the idea of purposely evoking the dead, it is at least as impious, as absurd, as odious to taste and sentiment, as it is insane in the eyes of reason. This protest the writer feels obliged to make, for while he regards the traditional, historical, and anthropological curiosities here collected as matters of some interest . . . he has nothing but abhorrence and contempt for modern efforts to converse with the manes, and for all the profane impostures of 'spiritualism'" (Cock Lane, 22).

Like many other well-known Victorians, Lang participated in the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, and even served as its president. But his opinions about psychic phenomena always retain a healthy skepticism. Stopping short of supernatural explanations, Lang favors instead explanations in terms of extraordinary, hitherto unidentified mental powers, including the power of "unconscious cerebration" to create illusions of ghosts or spirits and to perform telepathic feats. If we assume psychic phenomena do occur, then the theory that they emanate from the subconscious is the chief alternative to what Lang calls "the old savage theory" of "the agency of the spirits of the dead."⁴⁰

Just how the subconscious works—how to explain its mechanisms of projection, hallucination, dreams, and forgetting—was a major issue in late nineteenth-century psychology. British psychologists followed paths similar to those that led to psychoanalysis, and their explanations of psychic phenomena, in common with Freud's, tend toward ideas of regression and unconscious cerebration.⁴¹ In The Future of an Illusion, Freud writes that the beliefs of the "spiritualists" are infantile: "They are convinced of the survival of the individual soul. . . . Unfortunately they cannot succeed in refuting the fact that . . . their spirits are merely the products of their own mental activity. They have called up the spirits of the greatest men . . . but all the pronouncements and information which they have received . . . have been so foolish . . . that one can find nothing credible in them but the capacity of the spirits to adapt themselves to the circle of people who have conjured them up."⁴² Freud interprets spiritualist beliefs, as he does all of the "fairy tales of religion," as backsliding from adult, conscious rationality into the irrational depths of the subconscious.

Such an explanation of superstitions might do for the psychologists and also for Lang, who as an anthropologist was more interested in the products of myth making and religion than in experiencing the miraculous himself. For many of Lang's colleagues in psychic research, however, the realm of spirit was not reducible to that of the unconscious, even though the latter might contain unknown, potentially miraculous powers. In his Encyclopedia Britannica article on psychical research, Lang notes F.W.H. Myers's various studies; regrettably, Myers "tended more and more to the belief in the 'invasion' and 'possession' of living human organisms by spirits of the dead." He points to the same tendency in the work of the physicist and psychic researcher Oliver Lodge, and adds: "Other students can find, in the evidence cited [by Lodge and Myers], no warrant for this return to the 'palaeolithic psychology' of 'invasion' and 'possession'" (547).

Other late Victorians and Edwardians moved in the direction Lang held to be retrograde—away from an early skepticism toward increasing and occasionally absolute faith in occult phenomena, including demonic invasions and possessions of reality. Obviously the will-to-believe in such cases was powerful. A. J. Balfour, for example, Conservative prime minister from 1902 to 1905, produced several "metaphysical" essays—A Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1897), The Foundations of Belief (1895), and others—that make the case for faith by sharply dividing science and religion.

Balfour argues that the two are separate, equally valid realms; the methods and discoveries of science cannot invalidate those of religion. That his sympathies lie with religion is obvious. In his presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research in 1894, Balfour expresses his joy that the society's work demonstrates "there are things in heaven and earth not hitherto dreamed of in our scientific philosophy."⁴³ Small wonder that in 1916, when the former prime minister (aided by several automatic writers, including Kipling's sister Alice Fleming) began to receive spirit communications from the love of his youth, Mary Lyttelton, he came to believe that the messages were genuine. Small wonder, too, given his political career, that among the themes in the three thousand messages directed to him from the beyond is the establishment of a harmonious world order (Oppenheim 133).

Several early modern writers followed roughly similar paths from doubt to faith. In Kipling's case, the faith was perhaps never firm. While lightly tossing off such ghost stories as "The Phantom Rickshaw" (1888) and "The Return of Imray" (1891), the young Kipling showed what he actually thought of occultism in "The Sending of Dana Da" (1888)—and what he thought was skeptical to the point of sarcasm: "Once upon a time, some people in India made a new Heaven and a new Earth out of broken teacups, a missing brooch or two, and a hair-brush. These were hidden under bushes, or stuffed into holes in the hillside, and an entire Civil Service of subordinate Gods used to find or mend them again; and every one said: 'There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.'"⁴⁴ Kipling's satire, perhaps inspired by recent exposures of Mme. Blavatsky's fraudulence, takes aim at all branches of occultism including theosophy. The new "Religion," he says, "was too elastic for ordinary use. It stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have manufactured," including "White, Gray, and Black Magic . . . spiritualism, palmistry, fortune-telling by cards, hot chesnuts, double-kernelled nuts, and tallow droppings." It would even "have adopted Voodoo and Oboe had it known anything about them" (308).

In the story that follows this introduction, Dana Da, a magus from Afghanistan or parts unknown, is hired by an unnamed Englishman to produce a psychic sending or visitation to annoy the Englishman's enemy, Lone Sahib. Because Lone Sahib hates cats, the sending takes the form of an invasion of his bungalow by a plague of supposedly spirit kittens. Lone Sahib and his "coreligionists" see the kittens as materializations from the beyond, write up a report on them "as every Psychical Observer is bound to do," and grow ever more convinced that "spirits . . . squatter up and down their staircases all night" (313). At the story's end the Englishman who has paid for the sending asks Dana Da how he produced it; the alleged magus replies that he gave Lone Sahib's servant "two-eight a month for cats—little, little cats. I wrote, and he put them about—very clever man" (320).

Just when Kipling put aside skepticism and began to be something of an occultist himself is not clear, though some accounts attribute the change to the death of his daughter Josephine in 1899. Certainly her death inspired Kipling to write the psychic story "They" (1904), in which the protagonist communicates with ghostly children in a ghostly country-house setting. But by that time Kipling had also written stories dealing with reincarnation—"The Finest Story in the World" (1891) and "Wireless" (1902)—a subject of increasing interest also to his friend Haggard, whose views about spiritual matters are easier to trace because he was always less defensively ironic than Kipling. Some critics dismiss the problem, suggesting that Kipling occasionally includes supernatural elements in his stories merely for artistic purposes, but this approach seems no more explanatory than arguing that Dante writes about heaven and hell for artistic purposes. Nor did Kipling drop the supernatural after the early 1900s: several stories in Debits and Credits (1926) deal with the supernatural—"The Gardener," "The Madonna of the Trenches," and "The Wish House"—and so do other works among his late fiction.⁴⁵

Haggard was interested in occultism from the time when, as a young man in London, he attended séances at the house of Lady Paulet, who gave him his "entree to the spiritualistic society of the day."⁴⁶ The apparitions that he saw were not exactly spirits, he thought, but rather the products of "some existent but unknown force" (1:41). Occultism shows up in his first novel, Dawn (1884), which combines realism with, as George Saintsbury put it, the "elements of occult arts and astral spirits."⁴⁷ Haggard's second novel, The Witch's Head (1884), also supposedly realistic, touches upon the theme of reincarnation. After about 1900, according to Norman Etherington, Haggard dwelt with "increased fervor on the truth of reincarnation. The idea he had first tentatively expressed in Witch's Head, that lovers worked out their relationships in successive lives and literally eternal triangles, became a dominant theme in his later novels. He believed he had caught glimpses of his own previous existences in dreams and visions" (17). In The Days of My Life, Haggard describes a series of these visions of former lives, which might almost, Etherington says, "be tableaux from the ethnographic section of a museum," similar to "displays on 'the ascent of man' from the Stone Age to the Iron Age" (17). In the first reincarnation Haggard is a primitive man, perhaps of the Stone Age; in the second he is black, again primitive, defending his rude home against attackers who kill him; in the third he is an ancient Egyptian, in love with a "beautiful young woman with violet eyes"; and in the fourth he is probably an early medieval barbarian, living in "a timber-built hall" in a land of "boundless snows and great cold," though again in love with a violet-eyed woman, the same "as she of the Egyptian picture." Haggard believes that these "dream-pictures" can be explained in one of three ways: "(1) Memories of some central incident that occurred in a previous incarnation. (2) Racial memories of events that had happened to forefathers. (3) Subconscious imagination and invention" (2:168). The third explanation is the easiest to accept, he says, but he clearly favors the first or the second.

Kipling and Haggard often discussed telepathy, ghosts, and reincarnation. Although it is likely that Kipling believed—perhaps always with a certain ambivalence or ironic distance—in some version of occultism at least from 1904 onward, Haggard later opined that he converted Kipling to faith in reincarnation in the 1920s. "He is now convinced," Haggard wrote in his diary in 1923, "that the individual human being is not a mere flash in the pan, seen for a moment and lost forever, but an enduring entity that has lived elsewhere and will continue to live, though for a while memory of the past is blotted out" (quoted in Cohen, 122). This may have been only wishful thinking on Haggard's part. In any event, it seems likely that the very ambivalence with which Kipling approached any belief in the supernatural made him all the more ardent an imperialist. On political issues Haggard often seems more supple and thoughtful than Kipling, though always also ardently imperialistic.⁴⁸ Thus Haggard was not prepared to blame "all our Russian troubles" on "the machinations of the Jews." Puzzled by Kipling's often belligerent antisemitism, Haggard wrote in 1919: "I do not know, I am sure, but personally I am inclined to think that one can insist too much on the Jew motive, the truth being that there are Jews and Jews. . . . For my own part I should be inclined to read Trade Unions instead of Jews" (quoted in Cohen, 110-11). In contrast, Kipling, ambivalent about so many matters, is often dogmatic about politics: "Any nation save ourselves, with such a fleet as we have at present, would go out swiftly to trample the guts out of the world," Kipling declaimed to Haggard in 1897; "and the fact that we do not seems to show that even if we aren't very civilized, we're about the one power with a glimmering of civilization in us" (quoted in Cohen, 33). The only ambivalence here has to do with the meaning of civilization: perhaps it is a weakness, a disease; perhaps the brave if not civilized thing to do would be to "trample the guts out of the world."

Haggard's comparative uncertainty about politics is dimly reflected in the romance conventions he employs in most of his fictions. In common with other advocates of the romance as against the novel, Haggard hesitates at defending his tales as truer than realistic fictions or even as somehow true. He agrees with Lang that he is expressing universal, mythic concerns—writing about what Jung would later call archetypes.

But he also knows that his landscapes shade into the fantastic and are therefore highly subjective landscapes of the mind. Just as Lang is inclined to attribute psychic phenomena to the unconscious, so Haggard often suggests that his stories refer more to his own—or perhaps to universal—dream states than to outward reality. Haggard shares this emphasis on fantasy with all Gothic romancers, whose stories always veer toward dreams and the subliminal reaches of the mind.

The subjectivism of Gothic romance as a genre thus intersects with the atavistic character of both imperialist ideology and occultist belief. According to Theodor Adorno, "occultism is a reflex-action to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification." Adorno contends that "occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness," diagnosing it specifically as a "regression to magic under late capitalism" whereby "thought is assimilated to late capitalist forms" (239).

The power of occultism, as of Fascism, to which it is connected by thought-patterns of the ilk of anti-semitism, is not only pathic. Rather it lies in the fact that in the lesser panaceas, as in superimposed pictures, consciousness famished for truth imagines it is grasping a dimly present knowledge diligently denied to it by official progress in all its forms. It is the knowledge that society, by virtually excluding the possibility of spontaneous change, is gravitating towards total catastrophe. The real absurdity is reproduced in the astrological hocus-pocus, which adduces the impenetrable connections of alienated elements—nothing more alien than the stars—as knowledge about the subject.⁴⁹

Adorno's analysis of the interior parallelism between occultism and fascism suggests also the interior significance (the political unconscious) of imperial Gothic fantasy. The subjective nature of the genre is more or less apparent to all of its best practitioners. The motif of the exploration of the Dark Continent or of other blank spaces of external reality whose meaning seems inward—the fabled journey into the unconscious or the heart of darkness of the explorer—is omnipresent in late Victorian and Edwardian literature. Graham Greene is writing at the end of a long tradition when, in Journey without Maps (1936), he likens African travel to a landscape of the mind, a dream geography, to be understood as much in psychoanalytic as in geographical terms.⁵⁰ Africa, India, and the other dark places of the earth become a terrain upon which the political unconscious of imperialism maps its own desires, its own fantastic longitudes and latitudes.

All of Haggard's romances, from King Solomon's Mines onward, can be interpreted as journeys into the dreams of the protagonists and ultimately of Haggard himself. "I closed my eyes," says Horace Holly in She, "and imagination, taking up the thread of thought, shot its swift shuttle back across the ages, weaving a picture on their blackness so real and vivid in its detail that I could almost for a moment think that I had triumphed over Time, and that my vision had pierced the mystery of the Past" (141). After describing his fantasy of Ayesha in her youthful power and glory, Holly adds: "Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact" (141). Or, as Captain John Good says after the battle with the Masai in Allan Quatermain, "the whole thing seemed more as though one had enjoyed a nightmare just before being called, than as a deed done" (485). Over and over Haggard's adventurers liken their experiences to dreams as they leave the actual geography of Africa or Asia for landscapes that obviously have more affinity to the world of fantasy than to the real one. For Haggard, it requires merely a flip-flopping of the equation to claim the reality of reincarnation and the spirit world that dreams appear to shadow forth.

Haggard's fantasy landscapes often refer less to mental processes than to downright visceral ones, as his characters are swallowed up or temporarily entombed in chasms, tunnels, crypts, and caves: the Place of Death in King Solomon's Mines, the underground river down which the explorers plummet to the land of the Zu-Vendis in Allan Quatermain, the Caves of Kôr in She. As Holly and Leo Vincy escape the midnight storm that shipwrecks them on the coast of Africa, "we shot out between the teeth-like lines of gnashing waves into the comparatively smooth water of the mouth of the sea" (She, 43). As Conrad recognized, the basic regression fantasy of imperial Gothic involves a reverse cannibalism: the nightmare of being swallowed by the world's dark places has as its obverse side the solipsistic fantasy of swallowing the world. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow describes Kurtz as an eloquent voice, though uttering emptiness, "the horror, the horror." The restraint of the African "cannibals" who serve as Marlow's crew stands in obvious contrast to the fact that "Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts."⁵¹ At one point Marlow describes Kurtz opening "his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him" (61). George Gissing, too, sensed in late Victorian imperialism a cannibalism in reverse. In The Whirlpool (1897), after his friend Carnaby has ironically mentioned "nigger-hunting" as an excellent modern sport, Harvey Rolfe responds: "There's more than that to do in South Africa. . . . Who believes for a moment that England will remain satisfied with bits here and there? We have to swallow the whole, of course. We shall go on fighting and annexing until—until the decline and fall of the British Empire. That hasn't begun yet. Some of us are so over-civilized that it makes a reaction of wholesome barbarism in the rest. We shall fight like blazes in the twentieth century."⁵²

Gissing here captures the tone of much late Victorian imperialist propaganda. Rolfe's statement, though ironically made, seems almost to echo Cecil Rhodes's grandiose claims about painting the map of Africa red, or his famous assertion that he "would annex the planets if I could."⁵³ The latter assertion, often quoted out of context, seems much less self-assured when read in relation to what proceeds it—a near-lament about the closing off of global frontiers, a lament suspiciously close to spiritualist concerns with astral bodies and astrology: "The world . . . is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonised. To think of these stars . . . that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far" (190). Rhodes made this statement to the journalist W. T. Stead, who quotes it in his hagiographie Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (1902). About the only criticism Stead has is that Rhodes was a social Darwinist who never crossed the invisible line between secular ideology and spiritualism. Nevertheless, Stead does his best to bring Rhodes into the occultist fold, attributing an imaginary chain of reasoning to Rhodes which couples survival of the fittest with God's will. Assuming that God does exist, Stead makes Rhodes speculate, then in a social Darwinian world He would no doubt make it His will that Britain and the British, the fittest nation and race that history has ever known, should annex as much of the globe as possible, if not the stars. "If there be a God, I think that what He would like me to do is to paint as much of the map of Africa British red as possible, and to do what I can elsewhere to promote the unity and extend the influence of the English-speaking race" (98).

Of all late Victorian and Edwardian occultists, none was more sanguine than Stead about the truth of his convictions. He believed that God had given him a personal mission as a journalist, to defend the Empire and to trumpet the truths of spiritualism through the world. In reporting the news, he made innovative use of interviews with the great and powerful, and when the great were not available—when they happened to be dead, for example—he questioned them anyway through what he called "automatic interviews." Thus be was able to publish the opinions of Catherine the Great on the Russian Question and those of Gladstone's ghost on the budget of 1909. The headline on the front page of the Daily Chronicle for 1 November 1909 read: "Amazing Spirit Interview: The Late Mr. Gladstone on the Budget." In her study of spiritualism Ruth Brandon notes that "Mr. Gladstone, as it happened, had not much of interest to say; but the news (to paraphrase Dr. Johnson) lay in his saying it at all" (201).

Through the urgings of his dead friend Julia Ames, Stead made plans to open better communications with the spirit world. In his occultist journal Borderland and elsewhere, Stead projected a highly original sort of news agency—one that would transmit news of the beyond through spirit mediumship and that would be named Julia's Bureau. "What is wanted is a bureau of communication between the two sides," Julia's ghost told Stead. "Could you not establish some sort of office with one or more trustworthy mediums? If only it were to enable the sorrowing on the earth to know, if only for once, that their so-called dead live nearer them than ever before, it would help to dry many a tear and soothe many a sorrow. I think you could count upon the eager co-operation of all on this side."⁵⁴

Over the years Julia sent Stead many spirit letters containing news from the borderland, and she often exhorted him to open a bureau of communication. He saw these exhortations as a great opportunity but also, considering the numbers of both dead and living who might want to avail themselves of the bureau's services, as an enormous undertaking. On this score Julia was reassuring. In a communiqué dated 6 October 1908, four years before Stead went down in the Titanic, Julia acknowledged that the population of the spirit world was vast—of course far larger than the one and a half billion in the world of the living. But the desire of the dead to communicate with the living tended to wane quickly; therefore "I should say that the number of the 'dead' who wish to communicate with the living are comparatively few." Julia's ghost then offers what to any imperialist must have seemed an obvious analogy:

It is with us as with immigrants to my former country [Australia]. When they arrive their hearts are in the old world. The new world is new and strange. They long to hear from the old home; and the post brings them more joy than the sunrise. But after a very little time the pain is dulled, new interests arise, and in a few years . . . they write no more. . . . The receipt of letters and telegrams has taken away the death-like edge of emigration. "We shall hear from them again." "Write soon." These are the consolations of humanity even on the physical plane. What the Bureau will do is to enable those who have newly lost their dead to write soon, to hear messages. (175-76)

The emigration analogy suggests once again the complex, unconscious interconnections between imperialist ideology and occultism. To the ardent imperialist, "away" can never be "away"; nothing is foreign, not even death; the borderland itself becomes a new frontier to cross, a new realm to conquer. And with the help of friendly spirits like the Australian Julia, how easy the conquest seems! Just at the moment actual frontiers were vanishing, late Victorian and Edwardian occultist literature is filled with metaphors of exploration, emigration, conquest, colonization. Nor is the news agency metaphor of Julia's Bureau unique. An imagery of telegraphy and cablegrams, telephone and radio, permeates the millennial expectations of the spiritualists, as Kipling shows in "Wireless." According to the persistent modernist Stead: "The recent applications of electricity in wireless telegraphy and wireless telephony, while proving nothing in themselves as to the nature or permanence of personality, are valuable as enabling us to illustrate the difficulties as well as the possibilities of proving the existence of life after death" (xii). But though hard to prove, the discoveries of the spiritualists are at least as immense as those of Christopher Columbus: "In order to form a definite idea of the problem which we are about to attack, let us imagine the grave as if it were the Atlantic Ocean" (xii). Using similar language in Phantom Walls, Lodge writes of his hope "to be able to survey the ocean of eternity from Darien-like peaks," while Arthur Conan Doyle often seems willing to don armor and go crusading in order to conquer death or convince doubters of the truths of spiritualism: "The greater the difficulty in breaking down the wall of apathy, ignorance, and materialism, the more is it a challenge to our manhood to attack and ever attack in the same bulldog spirit with which Foch faced the German lines."⁵⁵

Both Doyle's and Stead's "sublime self-certainty" in their spiritualist writings, Brandon speculates, is a reflection of imperial domination (193). But they frequently express fears about foreign rivals and British slippage in the real world, so the self-certainty of their spiritualism must be largely compensatory. In any event, Brandon reports that three weeks after Stead drowned in the Titanic, "he appeared in his inner sanctuary in Mowbray House, where his daughter, his secretary and other devoted ladies were waiting. His face (so they said) shone out; and as it faded his voice rang through the room saying: 'All I told you is true'" (205). Stead's ghost showed up a few years later, at one of the Doyle family séances, announcing that he had "looked into the eyes of Christ with Cecil Rhodes by my side and he said tell Arthur that his work on Earth is holy and divine—that his Message is Mine" (quoted by Brandon, 220). This message came after the death of Doyle's son Kingsley, who had been wounded in combat during the world war and, while recovering, contracted the pneumonia that killed him.

Doyle's path to spiritualism was much like the one traversed by many late Victorians and Edwardians. In his Memories and Adventures (1924), he writes that his youthful education had trained him in "the school of medical materialism," formed by "the negative views of all my great teachers" (77). At first he was generally skeptical about occultism:

I had at that time the usual contempt which the young educated man feels towards the whole subject which has been covered by the clumsy name of Spiritualism. I had read of mediums being convicted of fraud, I had heard of phenomena which were opposed to every known scientific law, and I had deplored the simplicity and credulity which could deceive good, earnest people into believing that such bogus happenings were signs of intelligence outside our own existence. . . . I was wrong and my great teachers were wrong, but still I hold that they wrought well and that their Victorian agnosticism was in the interests of the human race, for it shook the old iron-clad unreasoning Evangelical position which was so universal before their days. For all rebuilding a site must be cleared. (77)

From the 1890s onward, Doyle became increasingly interested in the spiritualist rebuilding of nothing less than world civilization. He engaged in psychic research, experimenting with telepathy and searching for poltergeists in haunted houses, at first with a skeptical air but later with growing belief in an invisible realm of spirits just beyond the boundaries of material reality. If it seemed evident that adventure was vanishing from the modern world, Doyle for one rebelled against the evidence. True, his reinventions of adventure in fiction have about them the same compensatory quality that characterizes most late Victorian romance writing, which senses its inferiority to realistic narration. Romance writers indicate in a variety of ways that their adventure stories are for adolescents; and occultist pursuits are also somehow, even to occultists themselves, childish and subrational. As a young man, at least, Doyle perceived these difficulties but plunged ahead anyway, toward the blinding light (he thought) at the end of the long tunnel of world history.

In Doyle's 1911 novel The Lost World, the journalist hero Malone is told by his girlfriend that he must go adventuring and become a hero before she will marry him. The demand seems to him next to impossible because, as his editor exclaims, "the big blank spaces in the map are all being filled, in, and there's no room for romance anywhere."⁵⁶ But there is room—or Doyle at least will make room—for romance in a fantasy version of the Amazon basin, where the British adventurers regress through a Darwinian nightmare to the days of the dinosaurs. The characters in the story, including the atavistically apelike Professor Challenger, reappear next in The Poison Belt of 1913, where adventure shrinks: they watch the end of the world from the windows of an airtight room in Challenger's house. But the world does not end, the poisonous cloud lifts, people revive, and Doyle's band of fantasy adventurers live on to appear in a third novel, The Land of Mist, published in 1925, the same year as Yeats's A Vision. Challenger and the rest are now participants in what Doyle believes to be the greatest adventure of all, beyond the borders of the material world. Exploration and invasion metaphors abound. Lord John Roxton's newspaper ad sets the tone: Roxton is "seeking fresh worlds to conquer. Having exhausted the sporting adventures of this terrestrial globe, he is now turning to those of the dim, dark and dubious regions of psychic research. He is in the market . . . for any genuine specimen of a haunted house."⁵⁷ While the crumbling of the Empire quickened after World War I, Doyle himself turned obsessively to haunted houses, séances, lands of mysticism and mist. The skeptical Challenger exclaims that the "soul-talk" of the spiritualists is "the Animism of savages," but Doyle himself was no longer skeptical (19). He believed in magic, he believed in fairies, he believed in ectoplasmic projections. He believed Spiritualism with a capital S was the successor to Christianity, the new advent of the City of God after the fall of the City of Man. The creator of that great incarnation of scientific rationalism Sherlock Holmes devoted himself to the spiritualist movement, becoming one of its leaders, and it became for him a substitute for all other causes—for imperialism itself. Just as his friend Stead felt that he had received a call from God, so Doyle after the world war felt that the meaningful part of his life had begun. He had received the call; it was his duty to save the world. "In the days of universal sorrow and loss [after World War I], when the voice of Rachel was heard throughout the land, it was borne in upon me that the knowledge which had come to me thus was not for my own consolation alone, but that God had placed me in a very special position for conveying it to that world which needed it so badly" (Memories, 387).

Doyle's version of "Heaven was rather like Sussex, slightly watered down," says Brandon (222), but his plans for the future of the world were somewhat larger than Sussex. He believed the spirit world was arranged in a marvelous, infinite bureaucratic hierarchy very much like the British Raj in India.⁵⁸ In 1923 an "Arabian spirit" named Pheneas began to communicate with him through his wife's automatic writing, telling him that the old world would end soon and a glorious new one dawn. Doyle was no doubt reassured to learn that "England is to be the centre to which all humanity will turn. She is to be the beacon light in this dark, dark world. The light is Christ, and all humans will strive to get to that light in the great darkness" (Pheneas Speaks, 79). Sherlock Holmes cannot tolerate a mystery without solving it, nor can Doyle: the darkness of this world will soon disperse, and light, radiating especially from England and Sussex, will be universal. Doyle experienced a glimmer of embarrassment toward the end of the decade, shortly before his death, when Pheneas's predictions did not seem to be coming true on schedule, but it was only a minor setback. Material adventure in the material Empire might be on the wane, but over the ruins was dawning the light of the great spiritualist adventure.

As far as geopolitical arrangements were concerned, Doyle believed, the programs of all governments would have to be revised. In spiritualist armor, slaying the dragons of Bolshevism and materialism, Doyle sometimes felt that the future was his. Like the souls of the dead, the glories of the imperialist past would be reborn, purified or rarefied, for they were eternal. In his History of Spiritualism, Doyle writes: "I do not say to [the] great and world-commanding . . . powers . . . open your eyes and see that your efforts are fruitless, and acknowledge your defeat, for probably they never will open their eyes . . . but I say to the Spiritualists . . . dark as the day may seem to you, never was it more cheering . . . never . . . more anticipatory of ultimate victory. It has upon it the stamp of all the conquering influences of the age."⁵⁹ But the ultimate victory of spiritualism was prefigured for Doyle in the demise of the empires of this world, the precondition for the invasion and reconquest of reality by the realm of spirit, or perhaps of our transubstantiation—a kind of psychic emigration and colonization—into the world beyond reality, an invisible, even more glorious empire rising ghostlike out of the corpse of the old.

As cultural formations, both imperialism and spiritualism have roots in "the dark powers of the subconscious, [and call] into play instincts that carry over from the life habits of the dim past. Driven out everywhere else, the irrational" seeks refuge in imperialism, Schumpeter contends (14), and, I would add, in late Victorian and early modern occultism. Imperial Gothic expresses the atavistic character of both movements, shadowing forth the larger, gradual disintegration of British hegemony. Doyle's phantom empire—and the imperial Gothic themes of regression, invasion, and the waning of adventure—express the narrowing vistas of the British Empire at the time of its greatest extent, in the moment before its fall.

¹ Bithia M. Croker, The Old Cantonment; with Other Stories of India and Elsewhere (London: Methuen, 1905), 48-63.

² See Brooks Wright, Interpreter of Buddhism to the West: Sir Edwin Arnold (New York: Brookman Associates, 1957).

³ A brief account of the development of late-Victorian romanticism in conjunction with occultism appears in Tom Gibbons, Rooms in the Darwin Hotel: Studies in English Literary Criticism and Ideas, 1880-1920 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1973), 1-24. See also Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Knopf, 1983); Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).

⁴ Oppenheim, Other World, 160.

⁵ J. A. Cramb, The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (New York: Dutton, 1900), 230.

⁶ Carroll V. Peterson, John Davidson (New York: Twayne, 1972), 82.

⁷ John Davidson, "St. George's Day," in The Poems of John Davidson, ed. Andrew Turnbull, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 1:228.

⁸ Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional," in Works, 36 vols., Pocket Edition (London: Methuen, 1923), 34:186.

⁹ Jerome Hamilton Buckley, William Ernest Henley: A Study in the "Counter-Decadence" of the 'Nineties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), 134. See also John Lester, Journey through Despair, 1880-1914: Transformations in British Literary Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 9: both the imperialism and the socialism of the turn of the century "became charged with an overplus of fervor which exalted each at times almost to religion."

¹⁰ Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service (1903; New York: Dover, 1976), 15.

¹¹ Both White and Shaw are quoted by Lester, Journey through Despair, 50n and 5.

¹² Lester (Journey through Despair, 3) notes that this quotation from 1 Corinthians 10:11 "crops up recurrently in the literature of the time."

¹³ Lewis S. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling's India (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 57.

¹⁴ Edgar Wallace, Sanders of the River (1909; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), 277.

¹⁵ For these and other examples see The Best Super-natural Tales of Arthur Conan Doyle, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1979). An interesting variant is W. Somerset Maugham's The Magician (1908), based on the career of Aleister Crowley.

¹⁶ Andrew Lang, "Realism and Romance," Contemporary Review 52 (November 1887), 684. Page numbers are given parenthetically in the next two paragraphs of the text. See also Joseph Weintraub, "Andrew Lang: Critic of Romance," English Literature in Transition 18:1 (1975), 5-15.

¹⁷ Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (1871; New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 1:155, 142.

¹⁸ Quoted by Wesley D. Sweetser, Arthur Machen (New York: Twayne, 1964), 116.

¹⁹ David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), 62, 241.

²⁰ See Patrick Brantlinger and Richard Boyle, "The Education of Edward Hyde: Stevenson's 'Gothic Gnome' and the Mass Readership of Late-Victorian England," in Jekyll and Hyde after 100 Years, ed. William Veeder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

²¹ Judith Wilt, "The Imperial Mouth: Imperialism, the Gothic and Science Fiction," Journal of Popular Culture 14 (Spring 1981), 618-28.

²² Bram Stoker, Dracula (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 41. Punter (Literature of Terror, 257) calls Dracula "the final aristocrat."

²³ See Norman Etherington, Rider Haggard (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 47.

²⁴ H. Rider Haggard, Three Adventure Novels: She, King Solomon's Mines, Allan Quatermain (New York: Dover, 1951), 192-93.

²⁵ Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 37. See also Sandra M. Gilbert, "Rider Haggard's Heart of Darkness," Partisan Review 50 (1983), 444-53, and Carol A. Senf, "Dracula: Stoker's Response to the New Woman," Victorian Studies 26 (Autumn 1982), 33-49.

²⁶ Quoted by Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (New York: Schocken, 1976), 8-9.

²⁷ See I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 227-39. See also Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 34-53.

²⁸ P. G. Wodehouse, The Swoop! and Other Stories, ed. David A. Jasen (New York: Seabury, 1979).

²⁹ See David A. T. Stafford, "Spies and Gentlemen: The Birth of the British Spy Novel, 1893-1914," Victorian Studies 24 (Summer 1981), 489-509.

³⁰ Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (1919; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1951), 84.

³¹ J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 19, and Imperialism: A Study (1902; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965). See also John Allett, New Liberalism: The Political Economy of J. A. Hobson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).

³² See J. A. Hobson, John Ruskin: Social Reformer (Boston: Dana Estes, 1898).

³³ Hobson, Psychology of Jingoism, 13. Page numbers in parentheses refer to this volume.

³⁴ Frederic Harrison, Memories and Thoughts (London: Macmillan, 1906), 233.

³⁵ Robert M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (London: Nelson, n.d.), 22.

³⁶ Quoted by Etherington, Rider Haggard, 66.

³⁷ Joseph Conrad, "Geography and Some Explorers," in Last Essays (London: Dent, 1926), 17.

³⁸ Andrew Lang, "The Supernatural in Fiction," in Adventures in Books (1905; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 279-80.

³⁹ Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense (London: Longmans, Green, 1894), 2.

⁴⁰ Andrew Lang, "Psychical Research," Encyclopedia Britannica, llth ed., 22:544-47.

⁴¹ See L. S. Hearnshaw, A Short History of British Psychology, 1840-1940 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), especially chaps. 9 and 10, and Ed Block, Jr., "James Sully, Evolutionist Psychology, and Late Victorian Gothic Fiction," Victorian Studies 25 (Summer 1982), 443-67.

⁴² Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 28.

⁴³ Quoted by Oppenheim, Other Worlds, 132.

⁴⁴ Rudyard Kipling, "The Sending of Dana Da," in Works 6:307.

⁴⁵ Charles Carrington believes that "They" contains a warning against engaging in "psychical research," and J. M. S. Tompkins thinks Kipling grew less rather than more interested in the supernatural. But "They" clearly describes a supernatural experience. Perhaps all that Kipling quit doing was writing "ghost stories" of the skeptical, frivolous, "Phantom Rickshaw" variety. Carrington, Rudyard Kipling, His Life and Work (London: Macmillan, 1955), 373; Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 204. See also Elliot L. Gilbert, The Good Kipling: Studies in the Short Story (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 80.

⁴⁶ See Sir H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1926), 1:37-41. Hereafter volume and page numbers are given parenthetically in the text.

⁴⁷ Saintsbury quoted in Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, ed. Morton Cohen (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 4.

⁴⁸ Alan Sandison's contention in The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1967) that Haggard in King Solomon's Mines "as in every other [book] he wrote on Africa . . . repudiates without fuss the whole arrogant notion of the white man's burden" (31) is misleading. Haggard's frequent criticisms of the behavior of white settlers—especially Boers—toward black Africans lead to arguments for strengthening rather than weakening imperial authority. Haggard was a keen admirer of Theophilus Shepstone and Sir Charles Buller, and he patterned his imperialist thinking after theirs.

⁴⁹Theodor Adorno, "Theses against Occultism," in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 240.

⁵⁰ Graham Greene, Journey without Maps (1936; London: Heinemann, 1978), 104: "The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps. . . . This is what you have feared, Africa may be imagined as saying, you can't avoid it."

⁵¹ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1963), 58.

⁵² George Gissing, The Whirlpool (Hassocks: Harvester, 1977), 16.

⁵³The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes, ed. W. T. Stead (London: Review of Reviews Office, 1902), 190.

⁵⁴ W. T. Stead, After Death: A Personal Narrative (New York: George H. Doran, 1914), 50.

⁵⁵ Sir Oliver Lodge, Phantom Walls (New York: Putnam's, 1930), xi; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), 390.

⁵⁶ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World (New York: Review of Reviews, 1912), 13.

⁵⁷ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Land of Mist (New York: Doran, 1926), 132.

⁵⁸ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Pheneas Speaks: Direct Spirit Communication in the Family Circle (London: Psychic Press, n.d.), 10.

⁵⁹ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 2 vols. (New York: Doran, 1926), 1:173.